Late last year, Airbus and Aerosud agreed to collaborate with South Africa’s CSIR research business to develop the fastest, biggest 3D printer using titanium powder to produce aircraft parts. Boeing is reportedly already using the technology to make small parts. By fusing layers of the powder together with a powerful laser, the part is built up from a design, rather than milled from a solid block. This is also known as Laser Additive Manufacturing (LAM).http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1392&doc_id=251754

So this emerging technology is already beginning to diverge into several related but different fields, all with a role to play in innovative new manufacturing methods. Expect further breakthroughs to come thick and fast in the near future.

For generations, people have dreamed of communicating with their thoughts. Now, thanks to the first commercial device that successfully reads brainwaves and converts them into speech, telepathy is becoming a reality.

“We’re still short of the idea of being able to read someone’s mind, but theoretically that’s possible,” says Vincent Chang, who has worked with scientists at Stanford University and a range of neuroscience…

IPhone: Friend Book to Beam Your iPhone’s Contact Data with a Shake
“The coolest feature without a doubt is the new “Handshake”: put two iPhones running Friend Book together, shake them up and down, and the personal contact information of the phones’ owners will be beamed through the net to the paired phones. Handshake doesn’t work through a device-to-device connection, but instead passes location data back to Tapulous’ servers — two shaking phones in the same location means it’s time to swap information.”
Courtesy of Trends

Have you got a laptop or printer that needs to be recycled? Here’s a cool idea for making them capable of disassembling themselves when required:

“Active Disassembly is a promising technique for recycling electronics that relies on shape-memory connectors inside devices to pop apart under heat, separating valuable components without any manual labor required. Screws have been prototyped that lose their threads, as well as screen housings for laptops that pop apart to separate glass from LCD substrate. A typical cell phone can be broken down in seconds without any need to handle the toxic components”